2016 Goals – How did I do?

Last January I set some general goals for myself to achieve during the year. In June I got more specific about my goals and made them into goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound. I did a reasonably good job reviewing and reporting on my progress every month. Some months I didn’t have time to write, but I did review and continue working towards my goals.

Here is my wrap up on how I did before setting out on new objectives for 2017!

Get Back in Shape

SMART Goal: My goal was to lose 10 lbs. by the end of 2016. I was going to do this by tracking my food intake, reducing my snacking and eating more appropriate portions of food. I was going to increase my physical activity by going to the gym, Aikido training and biking to work.

I did track my food intake, but not consistently throughout the year. I went to the gym regularly at the beginning of the year. In the spring I stopped going to the gym after I started Aikido training with my eight year old. It was challenging to maintain the schedule of classes and when we stopped for the summer, we never got around to restarting in the fall. I started a new job at the end of the summer and our office is on the 8th floor so I climb the stairs pretty regularly when I am in the office – although most days I work from home. I try to do the stairs two-three times a day when I am in the office. When I work from home I sporadically go for walks at lunch.

I didn’t achieve my weight goal. I don’t have a scale so I don’t know what I was down to at the beginning of December, my clothes were fitting better though so I know I had dropped some weight. Weighing myself at the end of December after two weeks of gorging on chocolate and several large festive meals is probably not the right time to do it. I am up a couple of pounds since my last measurement. I do feel better than I did at the start of the year and I am generally eating better and somewhat more active physically.

I have work to do in 2017 and this will be an ongoing project with a more specific plan and realistic objectives.

Expand Thomas Woodcrafts

SMART Goals: Rebuild ThomasWoodcrafts.com to improve site management, customer experience and marketing platform; write promotional blog posts and send out a monthly newsletter; Exhibit and sell at three – four craft shows in the fall; develop an online marketing strategy and implement it; sell at least $500 worth of product per month by October.

It took me a while to get around to rebuilding the website, but I got it done and then I got hacked and had to rebuild it again. The end result is a cleaner site both in terms of appearance and on the administrative side. I still have some cleaning up to do and I need to rewrite the product descriptions to make them more appealing and informative. That will be a project for 2017.

I have produced four newsletters since early November and now that I am through the fall promotional period I will settle into writing one per month. I had written several promotional blog posts prior to November, but lost all of them when I had to rebuild my site. I forgot to copy and save them before deleting and rebuilding the site from scratch. Since November early November I have written three posts and will continue writing one – two posts per month.

I exhibited at four craft shows this year, one in the spring that was a complete waste of time for all vendors. There was very little traffic through the show and most of us lost money at that show. I did three shows in the fall with varying degrees of success, all were worthwhile and I made money at all of them. One of the shows provided a space for a conversation with a mum who was looking for small wooden cars and that conversation resulted in a new product. I know make purse cars, which has provided me with another avenue for using up scrap wood. I sold 20 of these cars in the last few weeks of December.

I achieved my goal of at least $500 in sales per month started in September and already have orders for January that will almost get me to that goal.

I did not get around to putting together a marketing strategy. I do have one that is partially developed. I did test out some different types of marketing in December that will help to inform the strategy that is in development for 2017.

Grow DadGoesRound Blog

SMART Goals: rebuild DadGoesRound.com; write evergreen content in the form of Dad Guides; make my Dad Guide: Your Daughter and her period available as an e-book for sale; clean up archive posts to add images where they are missing; submit guest content to other sites; increase readership to 10 000 by the end of 2016; publish one to two sponsored blog posts per month; generate revenue from the site through affiliate links and advertising on my site.

I rebuilt my site and re-oriented my site in March. I was struggling with what to write for the previous six months or so since I had decided to reduce the amount of information and number of images I provided about my kids to respect their privacy as they get older. I started producing Dad Guides on a weekly basis for several months and then life got busier and it got harder to find the time to produce them on a weekly basis. I will continue writing the guides in 2017.

The first of the Dad Guides was a series of four posts to help dads learn about menstruation and prepare to support their daughters when they got their first periods and puberty generally. I then edited them all together into a .pdf with the intent of converting it to an e-book format for sale. I still haven’t completed the final step of editing and making the e-book available for sale. This will be a project to complete in early 2017.

I am almost done cleaning up the old posts to add images. I was doing two a week and now I just do them as I encounter them. This task will be completed early in the new year.

I have started submitting older content to other sites and had one published on the Good Men Project in December. I am making a shift in strategy in 2017 that will give me more time for submitting content to other sites in the new year.

I had increased my readership to 6000 by June and expected to see growth continue for the rest of the year, but that didn’t happen. In part because life happened and my posting schedule became irregular and I had less time to focus on driving traffic. I am seeing regular traffic every day to my evergreen dad guides and some of my older content that I have been promoting through Pinterest and other platforms. I am taking lessons learned from this year to inform my approach for 2017 to increase traffic to the site.

I was producing a couple of sponsored posts a month for several months and I have written posts that include affiliate marketing and will continue to produce these posts. The job I started in August pays better than my last job so I feel less pressure to generate revenue from my blog. I will be writing these types of posts as I find opportunities of interest, but without a specific target.

More Family Time

My SMART Goal was to sit down as a family and develop a plan on how to spend more quality time together.

That didn’t happen.

My new job offers the same kind of flexibility as my previous one, with less travel so I am around more and working from home more often. The lunchtime walks with my partner were a great way to spend time together without kids when we were taking them. We fell out of the habit over the past month or so as the weather got colder and I needed to use most of my spare time to make products ordered from Thomas Woodcrafts before Christmas.

I did also make more effort to spend more time with my kids throughout the year and say yes more often to their request to do activities together. I have some thoughts on how to do a better job of this in 2017.

Smile More

It took a while to land on a strategy for how to achieve this goal. Then I hit on a simple SMART Goal – schedule reminders in my calendar to smile. It did it and it works. I see the reminder and regardless of what I am doing or how I am feeling I smile. It improves my mood every single time. I can put this one in the win category with a smile on my face.

November Update

At the beginning of the year I set out some goals for myself for the year and I have been doing a reasonably good job of tracking my progress in monthly posts, although September didn’t get an end of month update so this one will have to cover my progress for September and October.

2016 SMART Goals

At the end of June I updated my general 2016 goals to SMART goals. That is, goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound. Now each month I review my goals from the previous month and update what I plan to accomplish in the coming month.

The goals I set in January along with the updated SMART goals from June are below.

Get Back in Shape

SMART Goal: I am going to lose 10 lbs. by the end of 2016. I will do this by tracking my food intake, reducing my snacking and eating more appropriate portions of food. I will continue going to Aikido and biking to work as often as possible.

Well… I have not rejoined Aikido and I have not biked to work since July. I started a new job in August and apparently our office building doesn’t have a shower facility unless I pay to join the gym in the building. I also have a flat tire and they are super hard to change.

Admittedly I have some excuses here. Actually the biking thing is more about habit than anything. I am working from home fairly regularly and I have not settled into a sufficiently consistent rhythm in the new job. I am still adjusting to the new job and the new schedule since my work day stars and ends an hour earlier and i just haven’t sorted myself out to add biking into the mix.

I don’t have any excuse about rejoining Aikido. Life was too crazy in September to add in anything new and while my new job pays more, we are still getting caught up from having a month of no regular income as I switched jobs and pay periods. So adding another expense isn’t quite on the table yet. I think the realistic thing to do is to plan to restart in January once everything has settled down.

On the upside I am climbing the stairs to my eighth floor office most mornings that I work at the office and I aim to take a break once in the morning and once in the afternoon to walk down and back up the stairs. I fell out of the habit for a few weeks, but I am back into it. Most days I am able to do it twice, some days I have meetings that get in the way and then on days I work from home I only have one flight of stairs to climb. This week though, my wife and I have started going for walks at lunch when I am working from home, which is doubly great – exercise and time together holding hands.

We are both also tracking our food intake and are both doing well. Most days we are slightly over or under our targets for the day. Of course now we have halloween candy in the house and that is not going to help the situation. We don’t own a scale so I don’t know how I am doing on my goal towards losing 10 lbs. by the end of the year. I’ll find a scale at some point and jump on it to see how things are going.

Expand Thomas Woodcrafts

SMART Goals:

I am going to rebuild ThomasWoodcrafts.com to make it easier to use from the back end and more attractive and useful for shoppers. I will complete the rebuild of this site by the end of September.

I am going to write one promotional blog post and send out one newsletter to my mailing list every month.

I will sell my products at three – four craft shows in the fall. I will identify two more shows to apply for and submit applications by the end of the summer or as soon as the applications open.

I will develop an online marketing strategy by the end of July and implement that strategy starting in August.

I will sell at least $500 worth of product per month by October.

The website rebuild is done. Or at least as done as I ever consider any rebuild. Tweaking and adjusting will continue on an ad hoc basis. I’ll take another serious look at it in January when i’m not busy making product for craft shows and filling product orders. I am pretty happy with the results and now just have to make the effort to maintain and update it every month so that it remains current and doesn’t fall into a state of disrepair due to neglect like my previous site did.

I have not kept up with writing a promotional blog post per month, but I did get my first newsletter out which I am pretty excited about and have already had one response that will soon be an order. For this month I am going to schedule a couple of blog posts and do the same for December. It is a little more challenging coming up with blog content on a store site than for this blog where I can write about anything I want. I have some thoughts for the rest of the year and then for the new year one of my goals will be to map out an editorial calendar for the Thomas Woodcrafts site and produce content a couple of times a month.

I have done one craft show so far and have two coming up in early December so I have hit my three show target for the fall. There have been a few others I could have jumped in on, but decided not to push my capacity beyond what I know I can do.

Still no online marketing strategy. I have a loose one in my head that I am following. I am going to bump this to the new year as well when sales slow down and I have some more time for thinking and planning.

Sell $500 per month by October – Done. September was great, October was on target. We’ll see how November goes and I have high hopes for December since I’ll be doing two shows that month.

Grow DadGoesRound Blog

SMART Goals:

Convert my Dad Guide: Your Daughter and Her Period e-book which is currently only available as a PDF for newsletter subscribers to a e-book format for e-readers and make it available for sale through e-book vendors by the end of July

I will clean up two-three archive posts a week to include images until they are done. I am not sure how many I have that need this kind of updating.

I will develop a list of other sites where I would like to submit guest content by the end of September and I will submit two pieces of guest content to other sites every month with a goal of having one published very couple of months by the end of the year.

I will continue the work I have been doing to promote the blog and increase my readership. I will increase my readership from my current level of 6000/month to 10000/month by the end of 2016.

I will continue to seek sponsorship opportunities and will publish one to two pieces of sponsored content per month.

I will continue to review and add advertising and affiliate links to generate revenue without significantly impacting the readability of the site and content.

The Dad Guide has not yet been converted to an e-book. I need to get on that. I’ll get that done this month.

Archive post clean up continues, but at a slower pace than I set out for myself. Turns out that goal wasn’t realistic, mostly because it is time-consuming and kind of boring.

I have a list of other sites where I can think I will be a good fit and have started reaching out to those sites to clarify submission process and I plan to have my first submission in to another site this coming weekend.

My readership has been declining. In part due to my somewhat irregular posting cycle and in large part because it has become so much harder to get content in front of people via Facebook, which was a major traffic source for me in the past. I am growing my traffic from Pinterest and my baseline numbers every day are pretty consistent when I haven’t posted anything new so I know that my strategy of producing more evergreen content in the form of dad guides is working.

I’ve become a little less focused on securing sponsored posts since I started my new job. The pay is better and I feel less pressure to use my blog to bring in extra revenue. I am still working on sponsored posts though and have some new ones coming.

I continue to test out different ways to generate revenue through ads and affiliate promotions. I ditched google ads because I didn’t have any control over the ads that were shown on my site and I have instead set up a revolving group of banner ads that I am comfortable with and I’ll switch those up periodically. I will likely also build ads into some of my blog posts on occasion if it seems like a good fit.

More Family Time

My SMART Goal was to sit down as a family and develop a plan on how to spend more quality time together.

That hasn’t happened.

However, my new job offers the same kind of flexibility as my previous one, with less travel so I am around more and am starting to work from home more as I get the hang of the job. The lunchtime walks with my partner are a nice addition to quality time together for us, when we aren’t wiped out at the end of the day and just staring at the TV screen.

I do feel that even without a plan that I am committing more quality time to my kids. We are doing more puzzles and more reading together. I am finding time to chat one-on-one with them a little more often. The best development on that front is that my three year old has started telling me about her day at bedtime. I didn’t start this one, she has just started telling me that she wants to tell me about her day. So we talk a bit and she gives me the highlights of her day. It is pretty awesome.

Smile More

It took a while to land on a strategy for how to achieve this goal. Then I hit on a simple SMART Goal – schedule reminders in my calendar to smile. It did it and it works. I see the reminder and regardless of what I am doing or how I am feeling I smile. It improves my mood every single time. I can put this one in the win category with a smile on my face.

My Goals for November

I am comfortable with what I am doing to get in better shape. Stair climbing at work and walking when working from home, plus tracking my food intake all feels good and feels like it is working. I am going to keep it up for the rest of the year.

Thomas Woodcrafts – Things are going well. I will produce a couple of promotional blog posts and send out another newsletter. I will mostly be focused on building up my inventory in advance of the two craft shows in early December and making efforts to market my products online to capture holiday sales.

DadGoesRound – I’ll continue to publish at least two posts per week here and I will start submitting content to other sites. I’ll continue to clean up archive posts and I am going to finally get the Dad Guide to your Daughter’s Period edited and converted to an e-book.

I will continue to look for opportunities to spend quality time with my kids and take advantage of lunchtime walks with my partner so that we can get some quality time together without children at least a couple of times a week.

I will continue to smile every time my phone tells me to and I might even smile some times when I am not reminded by my phone.

It is the start of September – somehow we have reached this point in the year. August didn’t go as planned. Life as they say is what happens when you are making other plans. As those of you who are regular readers know, my dad passed away mid-August and as a result much of what I had planned to do in the second half of the month didn’t get done. [Read more…]

2016 SMART Goals

Last month I updated my general 2016 goals to SMART goals. That is, goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound. I set out some specific goals for July and for the rest of the 2016 year and each month I am going to review my progress towards those goals. [Read more…]

Six Month Goal Update

Six months ago I set five goals for myself for 2016. They were general goals that I have been working on for the past six months. When I set them I didn’t really follow the SMART goals framework that I have used in other circumstances when setting goals. While I have certainly made progress on my goals, some more than others, I didn’t set any specific targets that I could measure and achieve. In my defence, some of my goals are hard to measure and for others it was more a case of not knowing what I didn’t know. Now I have had six months to get a better handle on what I want to and can achieve so I am going to take this opportunity mid-year to upgrade my goals and work towards some SMART goals for the next six months.

SMART goals are:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable

Realistic

Time-bound

2016 Goals

The goals I set in January are below.

Get back in Shape

Expand Thomas Woodcrafts

Continue Growing DadGoesRound

More Family Time

Smile More

Accountability

In order to be accountable to myself and force myself to look back at these goals every month I have been writing monthly updates (I missed May because I didn’t have space in my editorial calendar). Below I am going to update my status on each goal and set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound targets for each goal.

Get Back in Shape

I have not done much on this front over the past couple of months. I started off the year well. I was going to the gym every day and started tracking my food intake on a daily basis. I felt great about re-taking control over my body and more importantly how I felt about my body.

I haven’t been to the gym in months and I stopped tracking the food I am eating. I did however start taking Aikido with my seven year old, although making it to classes has been harder than I expected. For some reason we have had quite a few things, work and general life, come up on Thursdays which have prevented me from attending the class. We have been pretty good at getting to Saturday classes. However I have only participated in a few of those classes because my partner has been teaching on Saturday mornings and so I take all the kids to the dojo and I am pretty certain that my 2 year old would want to be on the mat with me if I also participated in the class. It should be easier to make it to class over the summer because we have fewer other activities happening.

In spite of stopping the work I was doing on this goal earlier in the year, I feel generally good about my body. I don’t feel nearly as creaky and my pants aren’t as tight as they were at the start of the year. That said, they are still a bit tight and I have a couple of pants that I can’t comfortably do up and I would like to be able to wear them again.

SMART Goal: I am going to lose 10 lbs. by the end of 2016. I will do this by tracking my food intake, reducing my snacking and eating more appropriate portions of food. I will continue going to Aikido and biking to work as often as possible. (Now I just have to find a scale to weigh myself and keep track of my progress…)

Expand Thomas Woodcrafts

I have taken a break from Thomas Woodcrafts, in part due to other activities and in part because I haven’t sold anything in a while and I have a stock of products that are sitting unsold in my basement. I did a craft show in May that was a complete bust. Traffic at the show was very low and many vendors didn’t make any sales. I sold a couple of things which meant I came close to paying for the table. It is the second show I have done with this particular show organizer. Both have been disappointments. I will not be doing any more with them.

I have been approved to sell at one show in September and another in December. I need to shift gears and put more work into this business in the next six months to renew and re-energize this business.

SMART Goals:

I am going to rebuild ThomasWoodcrafts.com to make it easier to use from the back end and more attractive and useful for shoppers. I will complete the rebuild of this site by the end of July.

I am going to write one promotional blog post and send out one newsletter to my mailing list every month.

I will sell my products at three – four craft shows in the fall. I will identify two more shows to apply for and submit applications by the end of the summer or as soon as the applications open.

I will develop an online marketing strategy by the end of July and implement that strategy starting in August.

I will sell at least $500 worth of product per month by October.

Grow DadGoesRound Blog

I have seen great success with this goal. At the start of the year I didn’t have a solid focus on why I was writing. While I enjoyed the act of writing I was finding the process of writing the blog to be a bit of a chore. In March I took time to refocus and rebuild the blog.

Since then I have written 3 -4 posts a week, including regular series of dad guides on a variety of topics. I turned one of those series into an e-book, secured three weeks of camps for my daughters, been paid for writing some content, increased the number of readers who are reading more than one post when they visit my site and increased my monthly readership from just over 1000 in March to more than 6000 in the past 30 days. I have increased facebook followers to 500, sent out my first two newsletters and had an article published in the Globe and Mail. I placed my first ad on the site and began posting affiliate links and am looking at other options for monetizing the site in relatively unobtrusive ways.

While some weeks are a challenge to maintain my publishing schedule (like the past week) I am very happy with my progress on this goal this year, and most especially in the past three months. I still have some work to do to clean up the back end of the site and older posts so that they all have images that show on the site. I plan to continue my site growth and seeking sponsored blog posts and experiences for my kids.

SMART Goals:

I will change the permalink format and update all the existing posts to the new structure by the end of July

Convert my Dad Guide: Your Daughter and Her Period e-book which is currently only available as a PDF for newsletter subscribers to a e-book format for e-readers and make it available for sale through e-book vendors by the end of July

I will clean up two-three archive posts a week to include images until they are done. I am not sure how many I have that need this kind of updating.

I will develop a list of other sites where I would like to submit guest content by the end of July and I will submit two pieces of guest content to other sites every month with a goal of having one published very couple of months by the end of the year.

I will continue the work I have been doing to promote the blog and increase my readership. I will increase my readership from my current level of 6000/month to 10000/month by the end of 2016.

I will continue to seek sponsorship opportunities and will publish one to two pieces of sponsored content per month.

I will continue to review and add advertising and affiliate links to generate revenue without significantly impacting the readability of the site and content.

More Family Time

This has been challenging to manage with everything else I have on my plate. It has also been challenging to measure and gauge success since I didn’t evaluate the starting point and set any specific goals. My partner started a new part-time job which tends to be evenings and weekends so I am spending more solo parent time with my kids. That is not the same as more time together as a family. I am also getting more specific one-on-one time with my seven year old as we do Aikido together. However, while we are taking a class at the same time, it doesn’t mean that we are hanging out together.

The summer break from school and my summer vacation schedule does mean that we are going to have more family time together. That gives me a bit of time to figure out how to realistically achieve the goal of more family time.

SMART Goals:

Sit down with my partner and then with all of us as a family and talk about what everyone wants and set priorities as a family. By the end of July we will have a plan for how to spend more time or at least more quality time together for the rest of 2016.

Include the plan and SMART goals in my update at the end of July

Smile More

I am not sure this is one that I can measure since so much smiling is often involuntary. I do feel like I am smiling more and whenever I periodically catch myself frowning or feel like my resting facial expression one of blandness or dissatisfaction I smile and that brightens my mood.

SMART Goal: I have no idea if this will work or if it is realistic. I am going to set a reminder in my phone to remind me to smile at five specific times of day. I will re-evaluate this approach by the end of July to see if I think it is working and helping me smile more generally.

Next Steps

Time to get to work. I have set out several specific goals to accomplish in the next month and I will get those done, write a follow up at the end of the month and add in specific goals to complete for the end of August, etc.

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